NASA has just launched the Lucy mission

On the morning of Saturday, October 16, NASA launched the unmanned spacecraft “Lucy” from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The spacecraft took off at 5:34 a.m. ET aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. This space mission will last 12 years and will be objective of studying the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter.

For information, the Trojan asteroids orbit the Sun on the same trajectory as Jupiter. But scientists also believe that these asteroids could hold clues to the formation of our solar system. The Lucy mission is NASA’s first-ever space mission to explore several different asteroids, the agency says in a statement.

NASA wants to know the secrets of the Trojan asteroids

According to Hal Levison, Lucy’s principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), “ we started working on the concept of the Lucy mission in early 2014 so this launch took a long time to prepare “. He also adds that “ it will take several more years to reach the first Trojan asteroid, but these objects are worth the wait and all the effort due to their immense scientific value. “.

Namely that this mission was baptized “Lucy” in reference to the fossilized human skeleton discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 which provided key information on human evolution. NASA hopes that the Lucy spacecraft will do the same, but this time, the information collected will be on a planetary scale.